[B-Greek] ARSENOKOITHS: Did I get this right?
Jonathan Robie
jonathan.robie at datadirect.com
Mon Mar 14 16:19:08 EST 2005
I composed the following as a response to someone on another list who
claimed that ARSENOKOITHS is an obscure word, whose meaning is not
certain, but probably refers to some kind of male prostitute. I would
like to make sure that what I wrote is accurate before sending it - does
this really represent current thinking on the topic, or is the word more
difficult to understand than I think?
By the way, the transliteration I used is not standard B-Greek, but
that's intentional.
Jonathan
If I want to know what a Greek word means, I usually start by looking
at the dictionary. The standard dictionary for New Testament Greek is
BDAG: "A Greek-Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian
Literature", by Baur, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich, which gives the
following definition:
A male who engages in sexual activity w. a person of his own sex,
pederast.
BDAG indicates when a word's meaning is obscure, but it does not do
that here. Now we could just accept what the standard dictionary says,
which is usually a safe bet, or we can probe deeper to try to
understand why it gives the interpretation it does, looking up some of
the articles it references. Let's do that just a little in this email.
First, let's remember that our thinking may be different form that of
the first century. BDAG goes on to explain that 'homosexual' is not a
proper reading, referring to an article in Vigilaiae Christianae 40 by
William Petersen. In this article, Petersen points out a major
difference between modern thought and Classical or Roman antiquity. At
that time, male sexuality was regarded as polyvalent. "There were an
infinite number of options, any number of which might be pursued
serially or simultaneously...While individual tastes may vary,
virtually the total spectrum of known sexual behavior, wiht the
exception of transvestism, was acceptable (with varying degrees of
enthusiasm on the part of the chronicler, of course). Thus, a man
could be characterized sexually by describing his sexual ACTS...With
the emergence of Christianity...new lines were drawn,...but these new
lables were, perforce, applied on the basis of ACTS, just as the
earlier Greco-Roman labels had been.
In other words, ARSENOKOITES has nothing to do with sexual
orientation, but with sexual acts. According to Petersen, by the way,
the modern concept of sexual orientation originaged in 1869, when a
Hungarian physician, Karoly M. Benkert, coined the phrase "homosexual"
to describe "male or female individuals" who were erotically oriented
toward their own sex "from birth".
Of course, a dictionary can be wrong, which is why BDAG cites the
sources it relies on so that we can check up on them. I'm not
positive, but I think that Lin was relying largely (directly or
indirectly) on John Boswell's "Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
Homosexuality". BDAG cites Boswell, but also cites articles that
criticize him, and agrees with the critics rather than Boswell. Of
course, the dictionary or the articles might be wrong, but let's look
at some of the evidence they give.
One useful article is David Wright's "Homosexuals or Prostitutes", in
Vigilaiae Christianae 38. This is a long and rich article, and
discusses the use of the word in depth in a variety of
literature. Here are some of the major points (I'm leaving a LOT out).
1. The term ARSENOKOITAI is derived directly from the terms ARSEN
('male', especially in sexual contexts) and KOITE ('bed', both as a
noun and as a verb). It is related to other words, such as these:
METRO-KOITES - having sex with your mother
DOULO-KOITES - having sex with a slave
POLU-KOITES - sleeping with many men or women
2. ARSENOKOITAI closely echoes the Greek (Septuagint) translations of
Leviticus 18:22 (META ARSENOS OU KOIMEHESE KOITEN GUNAIKOS - "you
shall not lie with a man as with a woman") and Leviticus 20:13 - hOS
AN KOIMETHE META ARSENOS KOITEN GUNAIKOS - "if someone lies with a man
as with a woman".
3. A careful look at the way other writers of the early New Testament
period used the term ARSENOKOITAI indicates that they understood it to
refer to male homosexual sex (this takes pages and pages, and I won't
try to reconstruct it here).
4. Translations into other languages in the early Christian era -
especially Latin, Syriac, and Coptic - use terms that clearly refer to
male homosexual sex in those languages.
My basic problem here is that when I follow the usual rules for
understanding the meaning of a Greek word, I come up with different
answers than Lin gives me, and the sources I look at don't suggest
that there is need for a lot of doubt. Most of the people who disagree
with what you would find in standard scholarly works seem to be
advocates, and they seem to be rehashing arguments of Boswell,
arguments that have been refuted pretty strongly in the articles I
mention above and other places, and which no longer get much credence
on the biblical Greek mailing lists that I've participated on.
In other words, I think the dictionary is probably right, and when I
probe the references for this particular word, they seem convincing.
They also specifically refute most of the claims that Lin made,
arguments originally made by Boswell.
Jonathan
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